Around the country, high-achieving recent high school grads have unpacked their shower caddies, flip flops, and smart phone chargers, and begun to settle in at elite colleges like Columbia, Amherst, and Stanford. On campus they’re discovering countless resources, bright peers, and illustrious faculty. And for the rest of their lives, they’ll enjoy the benefits of having a top university tattooed across their transcript and resume.

But many high-achieving students are left out of this experience. Those excluded come disproportionately from families on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. One recent investigation reported that students from the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution comprise just 14 percent of the undergraduate population at the United States’ most competitive universities.

To find out why, I recently interviewed Karen (whose name I’ve changed for privacy reasons) as part of a study of 900 American public high school valedictorians and their college choice process. By all measures, Karen was a terrific student. In addition to graduating first in her class, she scored in the top one percent of seniors nationally on the SAT, earning a perfect score on one of the sections of the test. She was impressive outside of the classroom, too. She led more than one of her school’s academic teams and played in the band. She also grew up in a family where money was tight, so she held down a part-time job assisting the elderly and worked seasonally in agriculture.

Karen could have attended one of the nation’s top universities. She had the grades. She had the scores. She had the extracurriculars. She even had the type of work experience that stands out in an elite college’s applicant pool. Moreover, she grew up in a family where no one had ever attended college. Based on her record and background, many elite universities would have been happy to accept her. And based on her parents’ income, many even would have let her attend for free. But this top student went a different route. She enrolled in a local, less selective college that charged her more while providing fewer resources.

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And yet many poorer top students—despite their achievements—never give themselves the chance to hold an acceptance letter from an elite college, review the details of the financial aid offer, and ponder the proven advantages of attending. Of the valedictorians I studied, only 50 percent of those from lower- or working-class backgrounds applied to one of the 61 private colleges rated “most selective” by U.S. News & World Report. In comparison, about 80 percent of the valedictorians from upper-middle- and upper-class families applied to one of these schools. Yet when poorer valedictorians applied to an elite private college, they were just as likely to be admitted as wealthier valedictorians who applied. And because of the generous financial aid packages these institutions provide, poorer valedictorians who were admitted were just as likely to enroll as their wealthier counterparts. In other words, the critical factor that prevented poorer valedictorians from attending a top college was simply failing to fill out an application and click “Submit.”

Poorer top students are less likely to apply to America’s best universities for a variety of reasons. To start, high achievers throughout the socioeconomic spectrum receive insufficient, impersonal guidance about colleges from their public high schools. Valedictorians in my study reported that their schools primarily provided information about college options and the college admissions process to students en masse. As a result, valedictorians learned mainly about the in-state, public colleges that their high school’s graduates most frequently attended. Valedictorians struggled to get a one-on-one meeting with their often overstretched counselors, and even in these meetings counselors did not refine the college options they discussed to take into account the glittering achievements and tremendous potential of the top student before them. Counselors rarely suggested that valedictorians consider out-of-state or private colleges—and hardly ever mentioned elite universities. And when valedictorians took the initiative to ask about these options themselves, they all too often faced counselors who were uninformed and who sometimes even tried to steer them away from top institutions.

Without adequate college counseling from their schools, high achievers turn to their families. But the guidance families are able to provide differs greatly by social class. As in many other families where no one has attended college, Karen’s parents viewed all college degrees as equal. As Karen told it, their attitude was: “It’s a school. You’ll get a degree.”

Even when poorer families suspect college quality might vary, they have difficulty assessing it. And without a clear way to compare institutions based on quality, poorer families concentrate on sticker price. Many valedictorians from lower socioeconomic backgrounds took one look at a college’s price tag and were immediately scared away from even applying. Karen’s father recoiled from private colleges’ list prices, which were higher than his annual income. And while Karen was confident she could be admitted to institutions with large price tags, she concluded there was “no point in applying” since she didn’t believe her family could foot the bill.

America’s social hierarchy is perpetuated rather than restructured based on the achievements of the new generation

Families eliminate good college options because they don’t understand the extent to which need-based aid can reduce their actual costs. Karen admitted that she was “totally clueless” about financial aid. She was not alone in feeling this way. More than half of the valedictorians I surveyed who applied for financial aid reported that they did not have a strong understanding of the financial aid process by the fall of their senior year. And some families who would have qualified for aid were so misinformed that they did not even explore it as a possibility. Numerous families did not know that at some elite institutions, households earning less than $200,000 a year do not pay full price, and those earning less than $65,000 pay nothing at all.

When I asked Karen why she did not look into more selective universities given her stellar credentials, she replied, “Maybe just because no one told me to consider anything else. I don’t know. That’s what I knew.” Lacking outside guidance, many top students explore potential colleges by investigating only institutions that are already familiar. The problem is that social class shapes the types of colleges that students know. Poorer valedictorians may have heard of large, prominent universities like Harvard and Princeton, but compared with their wealthier peers they were aware of far fewer elite colleges overall.

In addition, poorer top students have difficulty envisioning themselves at prestigious universities. Valedictorians expressed concerns that top colleges would be too far from home, too academic, too intense, and not allow for a social life. Those who held these apprehensions tended not to have a student or alumnus from an elite university in their social network. In contrast, those who knew someone from a prestigious institution were more comfortable with the idea of attending a college farther from home and were less likely to think that the undergraduates at these institutions were out of their league academically or lacked time for fun. All too often, however, poorer valedictorians were less likely to know someone from a top college.

Clearly, this process is failing many of the best and brightest students. The current de facto system—which leaves college guidance to families—enables social class to have an unnecessarily strong influence on where top students apply and thus where they ultimately enroll. And because alma mater affects students’ lifelong educational attainment and job prospects, this system allows the advantages—and disadvantages—of one generation to be passed on to the next. As a result, America’s social hierarchy is perpetuated rather than restructured based on the achievements of the new generation.

Ensuring that students and their families have access to the tools they need to be informed college consumers can help fix this problem. The availability of need-based financial aid for families across the socioeconomic spectrum, including middle- and even upper-middle-class families, must be better publicized. Furthermore, families should assess a college’s affordability based on its net price—the price paid after financial aid—rather than its sticker price, and the net price calculators now required on colleges’ websites can help them do so. Also, in weighing a college’s overall value families should look beyond cost and consider graduation and employment outcomes as well. The U.S. Department of Education is trying to foster such thinking through its new college scorecard, though providing employment data is still a work in progress. In addition, public schools should replace one-size-fits-all college counseling with quality, tailored advice based on students’ academic preparation. Finally, colleges should improve their outreach to less affluent students so that these students become familiar with—and feel more comfortable applying to—colleges that match their achievements.

While there are initiatives, organizations, and colleges pursuing some of these strategies, the U.S. has yet to adopt a systematic approach. Until it does so, top students who have earned their place at the best colleges—and who would thrive from attending—will continue to slip through the cracks.

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In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

The text reflected not only the president’s signature syntax, but also the clash between his desire for credit and his intuition to walk away.

Donald Trump’s approach to North Korea has always been an intensely personal one—the president contended that his sheer force of will and negotiating prowess would win the day, and rather than use intermediaries, he planned for a face-to-face meeting, with himself and Kim Jong Un on either side of a table.

So Trump’s notice on Thursday that he was canceling the June 12 summit in Singapore was fitting. It arrived in the form of a letter that appears to have been written by the president himself. The missive features a Trumpian mix of non sequiturs, braggadocio, insults, flattery, and half-truths. Whether the dramatic letter marks the end of the current process or is simply a negotiating feint, it matches the soap-operatic series of events that proceeded it. Either way, it displays the ongoing conflict between Trump’s desire for pageantry and credit and his longstanding dictum that one must be willing to walk away from the negotiating table.

The 9-year-old has built a huge following with profane Instagram posts, but the bravado of “the youngest flexer of the century” masks a sadder tale about fame and exploitation.

In mid-February, a mysterious 9-year-old by the name of Lil Tay began blowing up on Instagram.

“This is a message to all y’all broke-ass haters, y’all ain't doing it like Lil Tay,” she shouts as she hops into a red Mercedes, hands full of wads of cash. “This is why all y’all fucking haters hate me, bitch. This shit cost me $200,000. I’m only 9 years old. I don’t got no license, but I still drive this sports car, bitch. Your favorite rapper ain’t even doing it like Lil Tay.”

Referring to herself as “the youngest flexer of the century,” Lil Tay quickly garnered a fan base of millions, including big name YouTubers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on her wild persona. In late January, RiceGum, an extremely influential YouTube personality dedicated an entire roast video to Lil Tay.

A short—and by no means exhaustive—list of the open questions swirling around the president, his campaign, his company, and his family.

President Trump speculated on Tuesday that “if” the FBI placed a spy inside his campaign, that would be one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. On Wednesday morning on Twitter, the “if” dropped away—and Trump asserted yesterday’s wild surmise as today’s fact. By afternoon, a vast claque of pro-Trump talkers repeated the president’s fantasies and falsehoods in their continuing project to represent Donald Trump as an innocent victim of a malicious conspiracy by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice.

The president’s claims are false, but they are not fantasies. They are strategies to fortify the minds of the president’s supporters against the ever-mounting evidence against the president. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show in their new book about impeachment, an agitated and committed minority can suffice to protect a president from facing justice for even the most strongly proven criminality.

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The Americans and the North Koreans were all set for a historic meeting. Then they started talking about Libya.

Of all the countries that might have acted as a spoiler for the summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un—China, Russia, Japan, the United States and North Korea themselves—the one that doomed it was unexpected. It isn’t even involved in North Korea diplomacy and is locateda long 6,000 miles away from the Korean Peninsula. It’s Libya.

Yet Libya ought to have been top of mind. It’s notoriously difficult to determine what motivates the strategic choices and polices of North Korea’s leaders, but among the factors that has been evident for some time is Kim Jong Un’s fear of ending up like Muammar al-Qaddafi. The Libyan strongman was pulled from a drainage pipe and shot to death by his own people following a U.S.-led military intervention during the Arab Spring in 2011. The North Korean government views its development of nuclear weapons—a pursuit Qaddafi abandoned in the early 2000s, when his nuclear program was far less advanced than North Korea’s, in exchange for the easing of sanctions and other promised benefits—as its most reliable shield against a hostile United States that could very easily inflict a similar fate on Kim. We know this because the North Korean government has repeatedly said as much. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency observed in 2016.

In excusing his Arrested Development castmate’s verbal abuse of Jessica Walter, the actor showed how Hollywood has justified bad behavior for generations.

“What we do for a living is not normal,” Jason Bateman said in Wednesday’s New York Times interviewwith the cast of Arrested Development, in an effort to address his co-star Jeffrey Tambor’s admitted verbal abuse of Jessica Walter. “Therefore the process is not normal sometimes, and to expect it to be normal is to not understand what happens on set. Again, not to excuse it.” As Hollywood continues to grapple with widespread revelations of hostile work environments, institutional sexism, and sexual misconduct on and off set, Bateman insisted that he wasn’t trying to explain away an actor’s bad behavior—while displaying, over and over, exactly how his industry does it.

Bateman’s glaring mistake in the interview—for which he has already apologized—is how he rushed to defend Tambor from Walter’s account of Tambor screaming at her on the set of Arrested Development years ago. In doing so, Bateman defaulted to every entrenched cultural script of minimizing fault, downplaying misbehavior, and largely attributing Tambor’s verbal harassment to the unique, circumstantial pressures of acting—a process, he suggested, most onlookers could not hope to understand.

The billionaire’s Twitter tirade was so ill-informed it led to a subtweet from his former head of communications.

Elon Musk’s screed against the media began with a story about Tesla.

“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” the entrepreneur tweeted Wednesday, with a link to a post on the website Electrek. The author of that post criticized news coverage of recent Tesla crashes and delays in the production of the Model 3, calling it “obsessive” and saying there’s been a “general increase of misleading clickbait.”

Musk followed that tweet with an hours-long tirade in which he suggested that journalists write negative stories about Tesla to get “max clicks” and “earn advertising dollars or get fired,” blamed the press for the election of President Donald Trump, and polled users on whether he should create a website that rates “the core truth” of articles and tracks “the credibility score” of journalists, which he would consider naming Pravda, like the Soviet state-run, propaganda-ridden news agency.

The president sent a terse note to North Korea’s leader, citing “the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement.”

It was going to be the first meeting between an American president and a North Korean leader in history—an audacious effort to resolve the crisis over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons. But on Thursday—after days of bitter back-and-forth between the United States and North Korea over how to approach denuclearization, with a North Korean official threatening a “nuclear-to-nuclear showdown” with the U.S. even as the North Korean government destroyed a nuclear test site as a show of good faith—the White House abruptly announced that the June 12 summit in Singapore would not take place.

The news came in a letter from Donald Trump to Kim Jong Un, the full text of which is here:

Dear Mr. Chairman:

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore. We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant. I was very much looking forward to being there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting. Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place. You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters. Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you. In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families. That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.

If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write. The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth. This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.